Thursday, September 9, 2010

New directions = new engine?

Well life and life had me away from coding. I was doing some tile mapping for another project or burning away precious time play Diablo 2.

I just haven't been feeling it for the last month. Maybe it's just August.

Anyway, I'm back up on my feet and coding again, but still haven't quite got into this project quite yet.

One reason is because GLBasic newest version has me playing around with some new features.

One such feature is the ability to load an image directly into an array, which allows me to make my Image to Voxel model program less limited and possibly much faster and accurate. The problem before was it was using getpixel, a kind of slow routine which on some systems would give inaccurate color returns.

But before I could start that, Desertfox of 64digits wrote out a nice algorithm for voxel ray tracing. Grant it, its still needs a lot more too it to actually render voxels, but so far I've achieved a few simple tests that seem promising.

If I can successfully recreate the function in Evaldraw which renders the models for this project then I can move the entire project to GLBasic, allowing me too connect a lot more things together and lose a lot of limitations I currently have.

While I doubt I'll be able to pull something off like Voxlap, doing voxels with ortho-squares is far more efficient then rendering cubes.  That and I've already have soom good ideas for lighting and fog from the Evaldraw version of the project.

At the very least I'll try and create a side-scroller/top-down voxel render for other possible projects, but I'm hoping I can achieve a decent 3d voxel engine for this.

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